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In 1953 the Hall Committee was set up to consider the “national economy in war”. The Committee assumed that the central government would stay in London although the attack would kill many ministers and their officials. The Committee’s report questioned if the Regional Commissioner organisation could take over from them and highlighted the need for an effective central government in the post-attack period. The report lead to the setting up of a second committee under Hall to consider the economy during the “broken backed“ period of the war and another under Maclean to consider the effect of atomic weapons on the armed forces. More importantly, a third committee was established under the chairmanship of Thomas Padmore, a Treasury official who had headed the Committee on the Redistribution of Government Staff in War since the late 1940s. This committee would consider the positioning of the seat of government during the initial stages of a future war.

Some information was becoming available from American tests about the effects of the new hydrogen bomb[1] and the Padmore Committee took this into account. Its first recommendation, made in February 1954, was that the seat of government itself should remain in London using existing and extended “protective works” to accommodate 7700 key players. This would only deal with war fighting and foreign relations and other matters that needed to be centrally co-ordinated. As far as possible domestic government functions should physically be devolved to the regions. Padmore then wrote to government departments to ask what staff they would need to operate on a regional basis for the first fortnight of the war and the totals came to a surprisingly large figure of about 1000 in each region.

By this time new bunkers had been built in central London to supplement the original Second World War accommodation. By the early 1950s a new single storey bunker had been built roughly half way between the Rotundas and Whitehall under what is now the Queen Elizabeth ll Conference Centre. More significantly, the military had acquired a major new bunker in Whitehall Gardens near the site of the former Montague House. A building on this site had originally been planned in 1935 with a reinforced first floor and major air raid shelter basement. Part of this was completed and used during the war as the Montague House War Room. By 1954, a new bunker had been completed on the site 20 feet underground and topped with 9 feet of concrete to accommodate 700 people. A massive new building was then built for the civil service on the site which became the headquarters of the Ministry of Defence and is today usually known as “MoD Main Building”.

All these bunkers were linked to the Whitehall cable tunnel that was enlarged to provide underground pedestrian access to the various buildings. Additionally, a new tunnel was dug under Horseguards to provide a new telephone exchange. The General Post Office also expanded a wartime series of 7 feet wide tunnels under central London to carry cables between its main telephone and telegraph exchanges

At the same time, a major trunk exchange was secretly built in London under Kingsway alongside the Chancery Lane underground station by expanding one of the Deep Level Tube Tunnels built during the war as large-scale air raid shelters[2]. Other underground exchanges were built at Birmingham and Manchester known respectively as Anchor and Guardian. These were major works. Guardian for example is 112 feet underground and its main tunnel 1000 feet long and 25 feet wide. It cost £4 million in 1954, the equivalent of £50 million today.

The early plans envisaged the seat of government staying in London at least until the Whitehall area became uninhabitable but as early as 1949 the Working Party on War Rooms advised that it would be desirable to provide an alternative CGWR outside the London target area. Now Padmore, as well as saying that the seat of government should remain in London, specifically recommended that a reserve facility for the seat of government should be established outside London to be known as SUBTERFUGE. In response, the Home Defence Committee of the Cabinet said priority should be given to SUBTERFUGE over the proposed protective works in London because even if a nucleus of government survived in London the conditions would make it very difficult to exercise effective direction from it. Moving the seat of government from London was seen as “impractical for reasons of morale” but “after the blitz a shadow government in SUBTERFUGE takes over and if something survives in London and it can continue to exercise some nominal direction via SUBTERFUGE, so much the better.” Padmore also said local government could not be relied on after an attack and so the regional civil defence chain of command should be strengthened.

Padmore took into account the effects of the hydrogen bomb which were beginning to be understood following the first test of it by the Americans in 1952. These effects, and particularly the impact of radioactive fall-out were spelled out in the 1955 Defence White Paper which said of the hydrogen-bomb, or “the megaton weapon”[3] as it was often called, “If such weapons were used in war they would cause destruction, both human and material on an unprecedented scale. If exploded in the air, a hydrogen bomb would devastate a wide area by blast and thermal radiation. If exploded on the ground the damage by blast and thermal radiation would be somewhat less but there would be additional extremely serious indirect effects. A great mass of atomised particles would be sucked into the air. Much of it would descend round the point of explosion but the rest would be carried away and descend as radioactive “fall-out”. The effect on those immediately exposed to it without shelter would certainly be fatal within areas of greatest concentration of the “fall-out”. It would become progressively less serious towards the outer parts of the affected region. Large tracts would be devastated and many more rendered uninhabitable. Essential services and communications would suffer widespread disruption. In the target areas, central and local government would be put out of action partially or wholly. Industrial production, even where the plant and buildings remained would be gravely affected by the disruption of power and water supplies and the interruption of the normal complex inter-flow of materials and components. There would be serious problems of control, feeding and shelter. Public morale would be most severely tested. It would be a struggle for survival of the grimmest kind”.

The White Paper went onto say that all home defence plans would have to be completely overhauled as it was no longer possible to think in terms of the experience of the last war or even of the threat posed by atomic weapons. A new approach was called for but the White Paper said that until the implications had been fully assessed it would be unwise to do anything. But this was a deliberate attempt to keep the real effects of the H bomb from the public and the implications were in fact being assessed, and in great secrecy, by the Strath Committee.

This committee of 3 senior civil servants, 2 military officials and a scientist and chaired by William Strath, a Cabinet Office official working for the Central War Plans Directorate was set up in December 1954 to consider the effects of the hydrogen bomb and in particular the new phenomena of radioactive fall out. Its report delivered to the Cabinet some four months later was a pivotal event in British Cold War planning but one which remained secret for nearly 50 years.

The Committee considered the effects of 10 H-bombs each of 10 megatons dropped, at night, on British cities and which would result in “…a threat of the utmost gravity to our survival as a nation.” As well as blast, one bomb could produce up to 100000 fires. Fall out would create “…an inner zone of approximately 270 square miles (larger than Middlesex) in which radiation will be so powerful that all life will be extinguished…”. There would be 12 million dead and 4 million other serious casualties – one-third of the population. A further 13 million people would be pinned to their homes for at least a week by fall-out. This compares with the two and a half million casualties expected from the 132 A-bomb attack.

Apart from the loss of life “The houses of a very large proportion of the working population would be destroyed or rendered uninhabitable by ordinary standards as a result of widespread damage to roofs and walls by blast. The effectiveness of the surviving working force would be seriously reduced by illness…longer term effects would be primarily to reduce the economic power of the country…”. There would be destruction over half the country. Forty per cent of industrial capacity would be crippled with grave dislocation of essential utility services over a wide area. This, in turn, would disrupt the distributive systems of the country and interfere with ordinary social and economic processes including the mechanism of money transmission. Apart from the direct loss of food stuffs widespread contamination would affect most forms of agricultural production and water supply. There could be no reliance on normal imports for a considerable time and the survivors would have to subsist under siege conditions on whatever stocks remained. The continued effect of these and other consequences of nuclear attack would be to set up a “chain reaction” in the social and economic structure of the country. Even those not directly affected would suffer malnutrition and be unable to give their best in the work of restoration. A disproportionate loss of the working population and of key personnel might leave excessive numbers of “useless mouths[4]” among the survivors.

Some information about the immediate effects of the new bombs was given to the public in a civil defence booklet called simply “Nuclear Weapons” published in 1956. It compared the “nominal” atomic bomb with a yield of 20 kilotons with a new “nominal” hydrogen bomb with a yield of 10 megatons. Its readers were told that a hydrogen bomb exploding at the optimum height of 8000 feet would produce damage over an area 64 times as great as the atomic bomb. A figure that explains the authorities’ private concerns that civil defence measures could simply not cope. The following table from the booklet shows the comparative blast damage ranges of 3 possible bombs –

The booklet showed why the Strath Committee were so concerned about fall-out. It said that blast damage from both atomic and hydrogen bombs would be greater with airbursts, which would give only small amounts of fallout. However, the destructive range of a single hydrogen bomb was so great that if exploded at the optimum height of 8000 feet it would exceed the size of all British cities (with the notable exception of London). Consequently, a lot of the blast effect would be wasted. Military strategists therefore expected that the Soviet bombs would be set to explode at ground level where the blast would still destroy the entire city but also create a massive amount of deadly and disruptive fall-out. The diagram below taken from the booklet shows the effects expected from a 10 megaton ground burst at various distances from “G.Z.” or ground zero, the point of impact. Figures such as these have been disputed over the years but they show what the authorities were preparing for –

The following year the 1957 White Paper “Defence – Outline of Future Policy” was even blunter when it said “It must be frankly recognised that there is at present no means of providing adequate protection for the people of this country against the consequences of an attack with nuclear weapons.”

At this time the Joint Intelligence Committee, which advised the government on Soviet military preparations were suggesting that the Soviets were unlikely to launch a nuclear attack in the face of massive NATO retaliation and in any case the Soviets would not have sufficient nuclear bombs or aircraft to carry them to attack until at least 1958. This no doubt accounts in part for the slow build up of the civil defence response to the H bomb although it was assumed that the aim of any Soviet attack would be to –

a. Knock out as soon as possible any airfields from which a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union could be launched.

c. To render the United Kingdom useless as a base for any form of military operation.

In practice, the Soviet Union did not have a meaningful strategic nuclear force until the early 1960s and then it would have had to take into account targets throughout North America, Europe and possibly the Middle and Far East. Soviet doctrine recognised the problems that Strath predicted but as material which has become available since the end of the Cold War shows it envisaged a different scenario to NATO and in particular US theorists. Like NATO, the Soviet planners assumed that the other side would attack first and with a devastating nuclear strike. But while NATO strategists assumed the strike would render further military operations impossible or irrelevant their Soviet counterparts expected that the Soviet lead Warsaw Pact forces would absorb it and then go onto the offensive. The strategic nuclear attack would be devastating but a nuclear war would still be winnable in the sense that the object would be to destroy the West’s ability to wage war on the Soviet Union both immediately and in the long-term. The initial role of Soviet nuclear forces would be to destroy NATO’s nuclear weapons, but then nuclear weapons would be used freely to support land operations in Western Europe. More significantly, once NATO’s nuclear forces had been destroyed, which would in itself cause massive civilian casualties, attention would be turned to directly destroying its population centres and economic infrastructure. The result was that the Soviet nuclear attack would be directed at civilian as well as military targets and would continue for as long as the war lasted.

The Strath Committee’s report recommended long-term policies such as siting factories and government buildings in safer areas, devolving work to regions, installing protected basements in new buildings and strengthening the regional organisation. More immediately, from a military viewpoint the report was traumatic. An attack on the scale envisaged would smash the UK home base and render it unusable for global military operations. The armed forces would need to be restructured for a much shorter war with little need for reserves of men or equipment. The focus of military activity would shift from fighting World War 3 to assisting the country during the survival period after it[5]. One consequence, for example, was the abandoning of Operation Knockout, the plan to repel an invasion and the subsequent closure of all the coastal artillery batteries left from the last war at places like Dover and Newhaven.

Despite the scale of the devastation Strath thought the country could survive and recommended large scale plans for public shelter and evacuation. The idea of requiring all new buildings to incorporate fall-out shelters was however quickly dismissed on grounds of cost and the problems that would result from older properties not having this protection. Evacuation was however considered and resulted in a plan to evacuate 11½ million people in the “priority classes”, mainly children and their mothers from the cities. The workers were expected to stay behind to ensure that the economy continued although some suggestions were made that this would be unrealistic and there were some ideas that plans could be made for the city workers to leave the towns at night and return in the morning – until presumably they were attacked and destroyed.

The Strath Report said it was impossible to forecast how people would react particularly if several bombs hit one city but “…there might be complete chaos for a time and civil control would collapse. In such circumstances the local military commander would have to be prepared to take over from the civil authority responsible for the maintenance of law and order and for the administration of Government. He would, if called upon, exercise his existing common law powers to take whatever steps, however drastic, he considered necessary to restore order. He would have to direct the operations of the various civil agencies including the police, civil defence services and the fire service. In areas less badly hit the civil authorities might still be able to function but only with the support of the armed services”. This suggests that martial law would be needed but later the report seemed to play down the idea when it said “Military authorities support the civil authorities in the maintenance of order and control and where necessary take over from them”. But, the idea of martial law was not apparently pursued and it was not even mentioned in the Chiefs of Staff’s discussions of the report. Instead, for the civil defence organisation, the first response to the report was to order an immediate strengthening of the administration. A Director General of Civil Defence had been appointed the previous year to co-ordinate plans at all levels but now the Home Office’s regional civil defence offices were enlarged and Regional Directors of Civil Defence (invariably ex-senior military men) appointed. These regional offices would oversee the civil defence preparations of the local authorities and look after regional level activities such as the War Rooms and exercises. At the operational level previous plans had assumed the Regional Commissioner would take on the powers and functions of the central government in the region if communications were lost with central government in London. This was now seen as virtually inevitable and to reflect this greater governmental role the Regional Commissioner would now be a government minister or a person of ministerial status rather than a member of what was referred to as “the great and the good”.

The existing Regional War Rooms would be too small both physically and in terms of staff numbers to direct the civil defence response to an H-bomb attack and to form the central government for the region. This lead to the idea of setting up a much larger joint “civil-military headquarters” in each region. In 1956 a nominal list of 441 staff was compiled (against the originally suggested 350). This list suggests that the intention was to establish a Regional War Room structure as before but with a much greater representation from the government departments and the armed forces to handle the post-survival period. The headquarters would still lead the regional efforts at “life saving” and it had a large military presence, which included the headquarters of the Army District, reflecting their increased role in the survival period and the large number of reserve formations now allocated to civil defence. But, the new headquarters would now have a more important and longer term role in acting as the government for the region until a proper central government organisation could be re-established months, possibly years, after the attack.

Some instructions for the new headquarters were written for Exercise Four Horsemen in 1958. These said that the “Regional headquarters would be, in effect a smaller nuclei of government at which, under the direction of a Regional Commissioner (in Scotland the Secretary of State) those departments having a home defence function would be stationed. The Regional Commissioner would execute government policy for so long as he was in contact with the central headquarters and act as the Government for his region if and for as long as he was isolated”. The headquarters would be manned at the start of the precautionary period when the Regional Commissioner would have specific powers delegated to him and then gradually assume responsibilities from the peacetime government machine. The Regional Commissioner would be supported by a Principal Officer, the peacetime Regional Director of Civil defence, Regional Police Commander, Regional Fire Officer, Regional Scientific Adviser, Principal Medical Officer and representatives from government departments and the district army command. The main government departments would be well represented according to their post-war roles and the largest contingents would come from the Home Office, Maff and the Ministry of Transport. The Regional Commissioner would be regarded as the effective central government authority for all home defence matters from the time he took up office but the devolution to him of powers would take place in stages. He and his staff would only act as agents for their parent Ministers until the central government nucleus took control when he would assume all powers except those specifically reserved for the centre but he would still act on any policy directives received from central government.

The 2 distinct but overlapping roles were summed up in Civil Defence Corps training notes from the time which said “In each civil defence region there will be in war a Regional Commissioner appointed by central government who will at the direction of central government undertake…

In 1956 the Regional Directors of Civil defence were told to look for suitable accommodation for use in an emergency. These would probably be in government owned buildings and preferably underground. At the same time plans were drawn up for purpose built headquarters which would be a “windowless concrete structure above ground giving protection against fall-out but not blast”…. built around a 2 storey operations/intelligence room. The building would have first floor and basement levels with the central redoubt basement having a very high protection factor of 1000. An innovation which was to continue in all subsequent proposals for regional level headquarters was the inclusion of facilities for the BBC to allow direct broadcasting from the headquarters to the survivors.

The first of these purpose built headquarters was to be built at an army site in Shrewsbury but, as so often happened there was a lack of funds and in 1958 the Home Office reported that construction of these headquarters had been deferred and efforts were to be put into finding suitable premises which could be adapted at short notice and at little cost.

By 1958 sites had been identified for these emergency joint civil/military regional headquarters (with the origin of the main building given in brackets): –

The planned building at Shrewsbury was abandoned in favour of a temporary site in World War ll tunnels at Drakelow near Kiddiminster which would in practice be used until the whole structure of control headquarters was abandoned over 30 years later. The Dollis Hill site, which had been used during the last war as the PADDOCK War Room was not developed and it became unnecessary after 1959 when the idea of a separate wartime London Region was abandoned.

In reality little if anything was done to prepare the headquarters. Equipment was not provided and staff were not recruited and when in the very early 1960s some regions held exercises for the new Regional Seats of Government which had evolved from the joint civil/military headquarters concept they often used the old War Rooms confirming that sites for the Joint Civil/Military HQs were not prepared.

Sub-Regional controls

As the 1955 Statement on Defence had put it, following the findings of the Strath Report, an attack with hydrogen bombs would result in a war, which “would be a struggle for survival of the grimmest kind”. In the following year, a civil defence circular[6] announced that “the megaton weapon has produced a situation so different in degree as to amount to a difference in kind”. This required a “complete overhaul of our home defence plans…the number of casualties, extent of damage by blast and fire, and restrictions on movement imposed by fall-out will necessitate a much closer co-ordination of effort, over far wider areas than has previously been required”. The circular then went on to announce a new level of control to respond to this need in “certain densely populated industrial areas” although it did not make the obvious connection that these areas were expected to be the prime targets for the megaton weapons. It said that the Regional Commissioner would still direct civil defence operations from the Regional War Room and, as in the last war, he would, if necessary, exercise full powers of central government. But to co-ordinate the lower levels of control in these areas sub-regions would be created each under the control of a Sub Regional Controller. He would be appointed by the Home Office showing that this important level of control would be a central government and not a local government one. The sub region would extend about 20 miles from the centre of its conurbation and the Controller would operate from a protected Sub Regional Control or SRC located near the boundary. This would have a staff of 96-108 people from the central government departments with civil defence responsibilities such as Agriculture, Health, Housing and Local Government, Transport and Works together with representatives of the GPO, the army and in particular the emergency services.

These Controllers would be appointed in peacetime after consultation with the local authorities and with “regard…. not only to their capacity to undertake the control of operations in war, but also to their local knowledge and standing” but they and the SRC would have no peacetime role. After the attack the SRC would control all the life saving civil defence activities in its sub-region in what were called “…large scale operations to succour the homeless”. The Civil Defence Corps Group structure in these sub-regions would be abolished and the Area controls would now report directly to the SRC. There was also to be a change in the role of the civil defence forces outside the sub-regions. Their task was now primarily to be geared towards reinforcing the civil defence effort in the smashed conurbations. It was also suggested that the civil defence forces from within the sub region should be withdrawn before the attack again confirming that the cities were expected to be attacked

London was specifically excluded from the Circular but continued to be divided into four parts, each of which was designated as a sub-region to give a total of 19 sub-regions. However, in 1958 the Northwest London sub region was split into two to create a new North sub-region. The rest of England and Wales at this time was divided into 45 civil defence Groups.

However, as so often happened with civil defence once the plan was announced little was done to implement it. In its 1957 annual civil defence report the Home Office said that no expenditure had been incurred on SRCs and also that the programme of local authority controls was virtually at a stop. By 1958 11 of the 19 Sub Regional Controllers, mostly ex-generals or colonels, had been appointed but the 1959 Home Office report said “no premises or staff have been earmarked” adding that county councils may have to be asked to provide them if necessary. In the same year the Official Committee said that “The present lack of any visible provision for the control of operations is one of the manifest deficiencies in the state of civil defence which discourages local authorities and civil defence services.”

In practice, all the planning for civil defence seems to have proceeded at a very leisurely pace throughout the 1950s and 1960s. The main reasons for this appear to have been the constant lack of money for civil defence capital expenditure, the lack of political interest and the planning assumption that the nuclear deterrent made a world war unlikely. But it also seems to be due to a general lack of enthusiasm amongst most civil servants in the government departments involved and the apparent need to set up a committee or working party for every activity. The methods and their effects are well illustrated by the provision of maps. In 1958, a working party was set up to consider the need for maps at all levels of civil defence and it decided that some 250000 maps would be needed. But, although obviously vital, they would be expensive and incur on-going storage costs and consequently nothing was done as a result of the working party’s report. The matter was then reconsidered and deferred in 1963 and again in 1965 before being quietly forgotten.

By 1960, some SRCs were coming into existence. In September, Midland Region held “Exercise Mercian Trump” to test the organisation of its 9.1 sub-region although, as the exercise brief said, there was no organisation yet laid down and they based it on the regional one. The exercise planners took the SRC’s role to be “the control of subordinate centres, the allocation of forces and reinforcements to subordinate controls and the co-ordination of the life saving operations of the subordinate controls”. In the absence of a proper SRC the exercise was held using accommodation at the War Room site in Shirley. The War Room itself was designated as the Regional Seat of Government for the exercise.

It was not until six years after the SRC plan was announced that a working party was set up to consider the organisation of an SRC. Even then, this only looked at its role in the immediate life saving period, which was only expected to last two to three days. Planners now recognised that the SRC would need to have a role in the following “rehabilitation” or survival period but this was not to be considered until the revised role of the local authorities in this area was decided. The working party suggested a nominal SRC with an operational area of 6250 square feet (see outline plan below) plus some 1800 square feet for kitchen, canteen, dormitories, washrooms, stores and plant rooms although they would not necessarily be in permanent or even protected accommodation. As with the War Rooms the emergency services, in particular the fire service would be well represented together with police and civil defence. The Sub-Regional Controller would have a Chief of Staff and an Administration Officer to look after welfare and general administration but staff numbers were to be kept to a minimum and the suggestion was for 88 to 95 people with again the communications teams who would work a shift system making up the largest element.

Nominal layout of the operational areas of a Sub Regional Control

With the inclusion of the SRC a control chain now existed, in theory at least, from the seat of government in the Central Government War Room to the individual Civil Defence Corps Wardens –

In theory, all these controls would be established in protected accommodation, manned by trained volunteers and equipped with telephones and telegraphs. In reality, most of the accommodation, personnel and equipment never existed.

[1] The information was very limited and much British planning was done in isolation.

[2] In the early years of the last war, eight of these massive shelters were built in London at the sites of existing underground stations. Each could accommodate 8000 people.

[3] A megaton is equivalent to one million tons of conventional explosive.

[4] This phrase had been used in the 1930s when considering the first evacuation plans although, perhaps reflecting the civil service of the day the “useless mouths” were termed “les bouches inutiles”.

[5] The Chiefs of Staff argued that they would still need conventional forces for localised conventional wars, particularly in the Far East

[6] CDC 28/56

Effect on houses	Range for air-burst nominal bomb 1000ft high (miles)	Range for air-burst 10 megaton bomb 8000ft high (1 1/2 miles) (miles)	Range for ground burst 10 megaton bomb (miles)
Total destruction	½	4	3 ½
Irreparable damage	¾	6	5
Moderate to severe damage	2	16	13
Light damage	3	24	20

File 3 A Difference in Kind – The Megaton Weapon
Central Government in War – the Strath Report – response to the H bomb
struggleforsurvival AT hotmail.com

The Padmore Working Party

Sub-Regional controls

Nominal layout of the operational areas of a Sub Regional Control